Talking Pictures by Ann Hornaday

Author:Ann Hornaday
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

DIGITAL HYPE

Did I just take a trip to Uncanny Valley?

Some of the greatest strides in digital photography have been in action-adventures that combine computer-generated animation and live action. The trend took hold with the final two movies of the Matrix trilogy, made enormous leaps in films like Avatar and the Lord of the Rings series, and reached new artistic heights in Life of Pi and The Jungle Book. Although publicity for these films often revolved around their technical sophistication and state-of-the-art computer graphics, viewers should judge them by the same criteria as any movie: in terms of story, character, visual dynamism, and overall coherence. As technologically groundbreaking as Avatar was, no one thought its storyline was particularly engrossing and, as is the case with many of James Cameron’s scripts, the dialogue was often painfully on-the-nose; similarly, I found the Lord of the Rings films, for all their visual spectacle, to be movies that were ultimately just characters walking and talking.

By the time Life of Pi won four Oscars in 2013—including for best cinematography—virtual filmmaking had become so sophisticated that audiences could truly believe a boy spent two hours on a tiny boat with a tiger, with no one catching on to the fact that the tiger was almost entirely animated. It was a far cry from such films as The Polar Express, 2009’s A Christmas Carol, and The Last Airbender, all of which plunged their characters into an uncomfortable netherworld between animation and live action, resulting in an eerie, not-quite-human look that industry professionals call the “uncanny valley.”

The advent of virtual cinematography has had enormous impact on camera movement as well. With its potential to send the viewer down any number of visual rabbit holes, with a similarly unlimited number of points of view, virtual cinematography naturally borrowed ideas from another computerized world: video games. Increasingly, action-adventure movies are borrowing the perspective of first-person shooter games, putting viewers “behind the wheel” as the camera moves through a series of episodic vignettes and bombastic set pieces. An early—and distressing—example of the influence of video games on films was the Wachowski siblings’ adaptation of the vintage cartoon Speed Racer, a chaotic, hyperkinetic mishmash that created a world of punishing sound, color, and light but very little depth or dimension. More recently—and far more interestingly—such dystopian thrillers as District 9, Attack the Block, and High-Rise have borrowed video-game perspectives to maneuver viewers through their single self-contained locations, much the way gamers navigate the “unified spaces” of their virtual worlds. Since the days of Speed Racer, the video-game aesthetic has taken firm hold as a visual standard that, to the eyes of young people and succeeding generations, will surely look progressively less strange, or even not be noticeable at all.

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